Saturday, September 20, 2008

Jörg Wickram (~1505-1562) was a German writer from the Alsace region (now France) who straddled the Renaissance and Early Modern periods of literature development.

Wickram's versatile output ranged from translation work (he translated Ovid without knowing any latin) to poetry, dramatic narratives and collections of humorous anecdotes (Schwank) that drew influence from Sebastian Brandt's 'Ship of Fools' (1494), animal fable satires and the medieval minnesang tradition (seen here recently). Although these collected tales were popular, Wickram is perhaps best known for producing the earliest forms of the novel in German literature.

'Kurtzweil' (1550) is a lesser known work of poetry in the vernacular German by Wickram, featuring crude anthropomorphic woodcut illustrations, reminiscent of (but predating) Le Monde Renversé satires. There is next to nothing by way of commentary around online, but I think it's a fairly safe bet that 'Kurtzweil' belongs to the satirical/moral body of Schwank anthologies, prevalent in 16th century German literature.

'Kurtzweil' is online at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek - the images above (cleaned up somewhat) were extracted from the pdf version that is available at the top right of the page (I had not noticed that link for MDZ digital works previously. The quality is identical to the display pages.)

There is a Jörg Wickram website in German that I don't pretend to understand but I think it was put together by a fan and provides background information about the places featured in one of Wickram's popular anthologies, 'Das Rollwagenbuchlein'. (there is more than that here, though)

The second image, righthand page, the boy (?) riding the cockerel suddenly struck me when I visited the page a second time! I remember seeing something similar on a classical Greek piece of pottery. It never occurred to me at the time, but I have since wondered if there was a subtle subtext... @'.'@

I tried looking up the Greek boy-on-cockerel to compare the two, but had no luck (well, I didn't look all that far--only came up with vases with cockfights). But I think the boy-on-cockerel is fairly normal compared to the facing page with the lobster-riding knight and his winged-heart helmet, which I didn't notice at all the first time around.